Top Takes From RealMoney

The RealMoney contributors are in the business of trading and investing all day on the basis of ongoing news flow. Below, we offer the top five ideas that RealMoney contributors posted today and how they played those ideas.

TheStreet.com brings you the news all day, and with RealMoney's "Columnist Conversation," you can see how the pros are playing it on a real-time basis. Here are the top five ideas played today. To see all that RealMoney offers, click here for a free trial.

Out of Trading Shorts and Into Small Longs

By Doug Kass
1:23 p.m. EDT

I am a buyer of what represents value and a seller of what represents merchandise that is dear.

As one who does not worship at the altar of price momentum, I am seeing some developing values in the market.

Accordingly, I am now out of my trading short rentals and I have bought small longs (on a scale) into this morning's weakness.

I will add on further downside pressure.

No positions.

Commodity Swap Bumps and Bruises

By Howard Simons
11:59 a.m. EDT

There has been some mention made of how rogue traders and fat-fingered mistake-makers can wreak havoc with the economics of fuel users. This is only true at the narrowest of margins.

A typical fuel hedge contract is a geometrically weighted index swap where the index itself is a formula based on a basket of competing fuels. The geometric weighting scheme minimizes the impact of one-day outliers. As a refresher, an arithmetic average over 10 days is the sum of the 10 prices divided by 10. A geometric average is the product of the 10 prices taken to the tenth root.

If anyone decides to buy or sell an airline stock based on some overnight goofball's trading miscue, please do so and end my search for this year's Darwin Award winner.

No positions.